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SoullessAutomaton comments on Open Thread: May 2009 - Less Wrong
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The telecommunications market in the United States is so ridiculously far from an idealized free market in so many ways that I don't see why you'd expect a libertarian perspective to be insightful.
The only sensible free market perspective on anything related to telecommunications has to pretty much start with "tear down the entire current system and start over".
Obviously we would do things differently if starting over from scratch, but that isn't going to happen, and it doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about the incremental steps we should take. And I don't think we should ignore economics when thinking about what those incremental steps should be.
Of course not.
However, the typical libertarian response is roughly "move closer to a free market", which does not necessarily give better results from all starting points. In the case of a market that is by its nature far from a perfectly competitive one, that's been heavily distorted by previous government interference, has several entrenched players, &c., there's every reason to believe that naively reducing regulation will lead toward a local minimum.